Gorca Earth Care – summer programme 2017

Between 1-24th August I was invited to participate in the Gorca Earth Care summer programme 2017. During this time I facilitated sessions with particular focus in the ideas/practices around ‘Radical Tenderness’ as well as engaged with the broader programme of activities, based on the following intentions:

“We see ourselves working at the edge of two important moments: we are assisting with the death of a world that has been harmful, but that has given us important gifts, at the same tim”e that we assist with the birth of something new, still undefined and potentially wiser.

In this process, we are committed to keeping our eyes, hands, heart, flesh and dreams open, as we learn to walk together differently in a foggy road.

We will respectfully engage with different experiments, knowledges, movements and struggles to learn about the joys, the challenges, the paradoxes and the pitfalls of offering palliative care to a system in decline and enabling other realities to emerge.

We have worked with different communities and visited many places around the world as we explored what we would like to do, and what we would like to do differently.

These are some of the questions that have guided our learning:

How can we engage and be taught by different systems of knowledge and being, struggles and attempts to create alternatives, (a)cutely aware of their gifts, limitations, ignorances and contradictions?

How can we engage with the gifts of alternatives (which includes their paradoxes) without recoding them in relation to our hopes, traumas, projections and fears?

What can engender a stream of connections between people that is not dependent on convictions, knowledge, identity or understanding? What can bring people together when they don’t have anything “storied” in common?

What can activate a sense of entanglement, care, commitment and responsibility towards everything that overrides self-interest and categories of thought?

How can we tap the possibilities that are viable but unintelligible/ unthinkable within the dominant paradigm? How can we invite people to consider what is deemed “impossible”?